Generally, with significant increases in electricity costs, it is recognized that many individuals and other entities are constantly addressing a tradeoff between a need for physical comfort and a genuine desire to keep electric bills to a manageable level. Though this can apply to a wide range of electrical appliances, air conditioning provides a useful example. Thus, among other issues, determining an optimal level of air conditioning for a given indoor environment (also referred to herein, interchangeably, as a “target” level of air conditioning), while balancing the oft mutually exclusive concerns of comfort and cost, is a technically challenging problem that is not easily addressed by manual calculation or estimation.